reviews

A Visually Rich Dance of Art and Literature

The visually appealing web magazine The Matador Review is a relatively new one, begun in the summer of 2016. The magazine’s mission is to serve as a “cultural conservationist” for alternative art, by which it means unconventional and progressive work, according to the “About” section of the website. Though “alternative” is a somewhat vague term, interviews with editor John Lachausse help to add some detail; one interview with Lachausse is posted here at TRR. In some ways, however, the “alternative” aesthetic of Matador Review seems to be left to “I know it when I see it,” rather than a strong, perhaps overdetermined vision. The editors encourage work from both “emerging and established artists.”

In addition to the magazine, The Matador Review's website includes a section called “The Matador Post,” a culture-focused space for prose work in the form of reviews, commentary, interviews, and personal essays. Broad categories for submissions include television, film, music, politics, video games, and sex and love. This looks to be a new project for Matador, since there are fewer pieces, or perhaps they have received fewer submissions for this section. As a site for shorter opinion pieces, the Matador Post could be a good place to send essays on popular art and culture.

The Spring 2018 issue of Matador Review is especially well-designed, displaying beautifully on a computer screen, particularly on a tablet or phone, allowing easy navigation from one page to the next, rather like turning the pages of a physical print object. The use of red and black text is easy on the eye and fits well with the magazine’s name.

In the Spring 2018 issue, prose pieces far outweighed poetry; there were four interviews with fiction or nonfiction writers, two reviews, three short stories, two nonfiction essays, two flash, and six poems, as well as eight pieces of visual art. A look at the Matador archive shows that this a fairly typical distribution, making Matador Review an especially good choice for fiction writers and readers.

The issue begins with interviews with Sloane Crosley, Dan Chaon, Lilliam Rivera and Samantha Irby, all prose writers across several genres and forms; Irby is a pioneer in creative nonfiction, Chaon and Rivera are novelists, and Crosley works in both genres. The interviews are conducted by the Matador staff, since they are uncredited otherwise. All were interesting, engaging pieces that offered a good sense of the interview subject’s voice. I will point out here that diversity in this issue is represented best by the subjects of the interviews, where several of the subjects, talking about how their lives inform their work, offer details that identify them as Latina or lesbian.

Contributed work in prose and poetry, twelve pieces in total, employed recurring themes of being on the road: travel, highways, restlessness and movement, all metaphoric for conflict and change, as is common in fiction. The protagonists tended to be young people— a teenaged girl, a couple in their 20s, a college freshman and her social-media-famous roommate. Gabriela Denise Frank’s nonfiction “The G N’R Plan,” centering on a teenage girl channeling much of her anger through her identification with the music of Guns n’ Roses, and Ted Lardner’s nonfiction “Sleeping Elephant Mountain,” about a man on a camping trip with his girlfriend’s young son, are strongly evocative.

Both short stories employed humor and a slightly skewed premise. Trevor Fuller’s surreal “The Right Object,” a young woman who begins floating away at Disneyland, only to be grabbed by her boyfriend and numerous others in an attempt to bring her back to the ground, uses the surreal circumstance to stand in for emotional reality. M.S. Coe’s “Vegans on UTube” starts out as with a realistic occasion—meeting the college roommate. Over time, as the roommate becomes a social media celebrity, the story shifts into hyperbole and exaggeration to make its emotional point.

Visual art follows the longer prose, with eight artists represented by multiple pieces each. A variety of forms are represented, from paintings to photographs, to screen prints, to photographs of sculptures. Thematically, I did not discern a connection, but my expertise is not in visual art. Taken together, the visual art provides an interesting counterpoint to the written pieces in the journal.

The poems and flash fiction seemed to overlap, in that the flash pieces were poetic, as is often the case with flash, and the poems were either straight-on prose poems (Carina Sitkus’ “Three Stages of a Binge”) or fairly prose-like in their rhythms. The only creative work in the issue that is explicitly from a nonwhite perspective is J’sun Howard’s “Dream Where Every Black Person Eats a Cloud.

The flash pieces and the poems seem somewhat of an afterthought here, since they come last in the arrangement of the issue, after many pages of longer prose; all of the interviews, short stories, nonfiction and two reviews, one of an album and one of a book, come before the shorter works. Organization of any journal’s content no doubt has editorial philosophy behind it; obviously, some editors choose to intersperse poems and prose, while others separate them. Both approaches have their place, of course. Looking through Matador Review’s archive, all issues of the magazine are arranged in the same order—flash and poems at the end. As a result, it may be that shorter works leave less of an impression, or are neglected by readers.